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Princess Arete
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Animation - 6.5 |
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Sound - 7.7 |
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Story - 6.7 |
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Character - 6.3 |
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Value - 6.5 |
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Enjoyment - 6.5 |
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Average - 6.7 |
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andy |
(2008-05-13 01:47:38) 2008-05-12 01:17:00 |
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| Average |
6.7 |
| Animation |
7 |
| Sound |
8 |
| Story |
5 |
| Character |
8 |
| Value |
6 |
| Enjoyment |
6 |
| Arete Hime initially seems like a typical modern iteration of a fairy tale, ala Disney, with a captive princess who desires to see the world and empathize with its denizens. Eventually, it shapes into a multi-segmented journey of self discovery more akin to "Siddhartha"than "Rapunzel."
When looking back at the entire Journey our main character, Arete undergoes, it is a bit epic. This in no way helps the fact that some stretches are completely starved for plot development, using the time instead to flash some scenic shots and play with a crap ton of Arete's monologues. Which brings me to one of the biggest problems with this film: it is dead focused on Arete. She will continuously feed you her dispositions and her albeit, genuinely pitiful perspective. She's a free bird trapped in a cage for most of the movie and she longs for human contact. That's the gist of basically every line she says, and she has many, many lines. While a philosophical and spiritual journey with a poorly paced, and overall uneventful plot may still be a decent read, it's not particularly satisfying as a film.
Arete is at once adorable and inspiring, in that fairy tale heroine manner, so all is not lost with this movie. Lectures on philosophy are one of my greatest peeves, and she throws a couple out there, but thankfully, most of her character development focuses on her perspective. Arete is not only starved of human contact, but also just the general gratification of being able to live. Her yearning for things so gosh darned basic, things as simple as friends or everyday emotions, illustrates the degree to which she is sheltered and makes her pitiful in a heart wrenching way. She's even more affecting because she doesn't just cry and accept the pity. Instead of lamenting her own misfortune (which she actually doesn't do, not even once), she always keeps her hope and her wits about her through tough situations to get the freedom which she so desires. Arete's mild mannerisms are a break from the utter exaggerations of most Anime characters, and is a benefit to her cause for sympathy. Emotional understatement is much more effective than rampant bawling. Her rounded personality makes her more complete, more nuanced.
It's too bad that Arete's character development didn't come with a richer plot, but at the very least, the focus she commands makes the blandness in the rest of the cast forgivable. Arete is a completely fleshed out, admirable yet pitiable, and altogether believable character that also happens to be adorable. Watching her adventure in Princess Arete is worth suffering the disjointed and hallow plot.
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1 of 1 people found this review helpful.
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| Average |
9.8 |
| Animation |
9 |
| Sound |
10 |
| Story |
10 |
| Character |
10 |
| Value |
10 |
| Enjoyment |
10 |
| Princess Arete is very different from normal fairy-tales you know. Brave princes, old king, even little magic - all you can finde here but what differs is the way the story is told.
It is set to medieval ages (but maybe not - watch it and you'll see) and you know - there are very few anime that takes place there (and even little of them are good - what Arete definatelly is). It tells the tale of young princess who is imprisoned in her own castle without chance to leave it and her future is straight line drawn by her father. She is destined to marry some brave prince and to rule the kingdom with him. Then, a sorcerer cames who take her away and with it her story begins to unfold.
Animation is good - character are fine and background are amazing - even though they used little CGI, here it fits perfectly. The sounds and music are also good, especially music - which fills your heart with emotions.
What you have in front of you is poetic story about common desires of common people and one little girl who just want to fulfil her dream - breathtaking experience in a way how this movie pull you inside it...
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Pantha |
(2005-02-12 16:21:08) 2004-10-07 00:36:23 |
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| Average |
4.3 |
| Animation |
5 |
| Sound |
7 |
| Story |
4 |
| Character |
2 |
| Value |
4 |
| Enjoyment |
4 |
| Fairy tale? Well, Princess Arete is the most tedious and unimaginative fairy tale you'll ever watch. There's no Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, but instead, we have a yawn-inducing and self-absorbed princess. There is a frog, but he's no prince, I assure you. There's also a sorcerer, but he's no Dumbledore. In fact, this anime would have been a great satire. If only there was something clever or funny about it...
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0 of 0 people found this review helpful.
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| Average |
4.8 |
| Animation |
4 |
| Sound |
6 |
| Story |
5 |
| Character |
4 |
| Value |
5 |
| Enjoyment |
5 |
| It's rather sad to say, but I get the feeling that I blew 100 minutes watching Princess Arete. At best it tells a relatively charming tale about a girl who no longer wishes to confine herself to the mundane proceedings of her life as a princess; at worst, it's just as mundane as the existence that plagues its titular character so. This movie is unfortunately mediocre on just about every front imaginable, neither excelling nor miserably failing at any given aspect. Unfortunately, mediocre is simply not good enough, and Princess Arete has all the makings of forgettability.
It didn't really surprise me that Princess Arete was animated in 2000 -- though the general look and feel of the anime is highly primitive, it's obvious that computerization definitely helped out in several aspects such as coloring. The graphical design is astonishingly plain, considering what an open-ended genre fantasy is for developing strong visuals, and just about everything in the movie suffers from a decided lack of sheen. Settings are often very bleak, poorly lit or both, lacking very much variety or color to them. Greys and browns are the predominant color here, much to my dismay, and the design is simply not appealing to the eyes. The character design is possibly the least attractive graphical grouping in this movie, which is unfortunate. From facial features and hairstyling right down to the costumes, the characters look very bland and unmemorable. Again, a lack of color invades Princess Arete here, and it dectracts very noticeably from the experience. The only part that really rose above ugliness was the brief scene with the falling stars, which was surprisingly beautiful and well-animated. One section, however, cannot excuse the fact that Arete does not meet the visual standards of its time...or ten years before its time.
I was a little more impressed with the sound in Princess Arete, mainly due to the good-but-not-great Gaelic-flavored insert songs and a wonderful vocal piece used about halfway into the anime. It had beautiful lyrics translated by Solar and kept my engagement during an otherwise completely pointless scene. Likewise, the ending theme was also quite solid, with some lovely vocals to complement it. A lot of the other aspects of the sound direction, like a majority of the other music and voice acting, simply came up short.
If you're expecting any different from the story elements of Princess Arete as opposed to its aesthetics, you might as well stop reading now. This anime's storyline began in a relatively engaging, if not cliched, fashion, but then quickly degenerated into mind-numbing boredom. Now, I have a very high tolerance for inactivity in anime, but getting through Princess Arete was an absolute test of willpower. The first 30 minutes start out being fairly entertaining, but then for about 45 minutes after this it became so dismally boring and downbeat that I stopped watching it twice to do other things before returning to it later. I think this is owed largely in part to a transformation that occurs in the main character which happens to make her nerve-gratingly vapid and useless. Once she had returned to herself in the final 25 minutes of the anime, my swiftly-waning attention returned, though I wasn't exactly rewarded by the culmination of the anime either. According to the main page for Princess Arete, it was based on a fairy tale, but if the source material was any more coherent than this then the directors must have played the world's worst game of Telephone converting it to a visual media. The movie cannot decide what it's doing with itself, thrusting Arete around in a bunch of different situations and introducing a bunch of pointless plot points that may have suggested the movie's moral but then were not elaborated on enough. The end result is that I had no IDEA what the movie was trying to communicate; it may have been the idea of living freely amongst everyone else, but all of the other elements of morality that the anime forces down the viewer's throat muddle it too much for it to be profound or effective in any way. It isn't just the emotional lessons that are confused in Princess Arete...the direction of the plot itself changes tack an incredible amount of times, causing a lot of dead plot points to be created and eventually reaching a state where we have no idea what the characters are trying to do. How this movie managed to cause so much confusion and boredom to me in an hour and a half is beyond me.
I never warmed up to Arete, even though the anime really did try to make her a likeable character. She is just far too pragmatic and down-to-earth for a girl of her age; I suppose it's a side effect of being locked in a tower for a long amount of time, but it made her distant and somewhat unapproachable. I thought at first that her level-headedness would make her a more tolerable character than most hyperactive anime heroines, but unfortunately I was proven wrong. Furthermore, even though she looks to be about 10 she is inordinately logical and has more common sense than just about any other anime character I've ever observed. Though the anime depicts that she has read a lot of books in her time of captivity, it is unrealistic to assume that the knowledge she's gained from them helps her out in all of her times of crises. However, she does not spend the entire movie in this form; about 30 minutes in another character turns her into an adolescent form of herself, which was just about the worst directorial decision I've ever seen in anime. The new Arete is utterly worthless on screen and has very little dialogue, almost all of it being agreement with another character or one-word replies. While the initial Arete may have been a little difficult to swallow, her teenage form makes me want to beat her across the head with a rock, which would probably be impossible given her laughably large hair. Without the heroine to keep us entertained, we are forced to subside on the antics of a decidedly archetypal pair: the Sorcerer and his Frog-Man Apprentice. These characters are horribly boring at both comic relief and drama, and they fail completely at carrying the anime for the long time that Arete is stupefied. These 45 minutes are easily the worst of the movie because generally nothing happens, and I find it rather funny that the characters in Princess Arete were just as bored at this point as I was.
Watching this movie was not time well spent. It had no prerogative for its mediocrity and nothing to keep me watching further; I am fairly surprised that I managed to make it through in the first place. Though it had its high points (it's quite amusing to watch Arete embarrass her suitors early on, and the climax is decently entertaining), they just weren't enough to justify the insane amount of dead space that filled Princess Arete.
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leelaa |
(2008-04-06 01:17:57) 2004-07-23 03:53:39 |
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| Average |
5.3 |
| Animation |
6 |
| Sound |
6 |
| Story |
6 |
| Character |
4 |
| Value |
5 |
| Enjoyment |
5 |
| Princess Arete was enjoyable with a happy message of human potential, something quite different from Jin-Roh.
The story follows the little adventure of Princess Arete who goes out to discover the real world - she is a bit of a bookworm and filled with ideals of justice and the power of human hands.
The characters were decent without being either too memorable or too annoying.
Since it is readily available on fan sub I would check it out one lazy summer day. If you watch it without too many expectations you are sure to be entertained. The morals are not profound enough to make this an amazing must see movie, but I liked it and finished the movie with a satisfied smile and a warm-fuzzy feeling.
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Facelesz |
(2004-07-23 05:48:43) 2004-07-22 21:11:17 |
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| Average |
9.2 |
| Animation |
8 |
| Sound |
9 |
| Story |
10 |
| Character |
10 |
| Value |
9 |
| Enjoyment |
9 |
| This is the first animé movie i really liked. Not because of the story, but because i like the atmosphere, the ethical questions, the way Arete thinks about the things around here. What she does matches some things i've done and i found it really interesting to see something like this in a movie.
Those questions make the movie quite interesting to watch, while the music and animation make a good atmosphere.
The story loses strength in the middle, it gets a little boring and i found it hard to watch on, but it was well worth it, even though the ending was a little bit short and i expected some ending like "and she lived on, telling people about what humans can acomplish"... but actually i didn't need to hear that since i already understood that.;)
The movie isn't exciting, but it is enjoyable, worth watching, even though most people will find it boring.
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